Zika peut \u00e9galement \u00eatre un bon mod\u00e8le du deuxi\u00e8me effet inqui\u00e9tant – la mutation de la maladie. L\u2019une des raisons pour lesquelles vous n\u2019aviez pas entendu parler de Zika jusqu\u2019\u00e0 r\u00e9cemment, c\u2019est qu\u2019elle avait \u00e9t\u00e9 pi\u00e9g\u00e9e en Ouganda; un autre est qu\u2019il n\u2019a pas sembl\u00e9, jusqu\u2019\u00e0 r\u00e9cemment, causer des anomalies cong\u00e9nitales. Les scientifiques ne comprennent toujours pas tout \u00e0 fait ce qui s\u2019est pass\u00e9 ou ce qu\u2019ils ont oubli\u00e9. Nous savons cependant avec certitude que le climat affecte certaines maladies: le paludisme, par exemple, se d\u00e9veloppe bien dans les r\u00e9gions les plus chaudes, non seulement \u00e0 cause des moustiques qui le portent, mais aussi parce que, chaque degr\u00e9 de temp\u00e9rature augmentant, le parasite en reproduit dix. fois plus vite. C'est l'une des raisons pour lesquelles la Banque mondiale estime que, d'ici 2050, 5,2 milliards de personnes compteront avec.<\/p>\nUn smog mort qui \u00e9touffe des millions de personnes.<\/em><\/p>\n\nNos poumons ont besoin d'oxyg\u00e8ne, mais ce n'est qu'une fraction de ce que nous respirons. La fraction de dioxyde de carbone augmente: elle d\u00e9passe juste 400 parties par million, et les estimations les plus \u00e9lev\u00e9es extrapolant \u00e0 partir des tendances actuelles sugg\u00e8rent qu\u2019elle atteindra 1 000 ppm d\u2019ici 2100. \u00c0 cette concentration, par rapport \u00e0 l\u2019air que nous respirons maintenant, la capacit\u00e9 cognitive humaine diminue. de 21 pour cent.<\/p>\n\nD'autres \u00e9l\u00e9ments dans l'air chaud sont encore plus effrayants, avec de petites augmentations de pollution capables de r\u00e9duire la dur\u00e9e de vie de dix ans. Plus la plan\u00e8te se r\u00e9chauffe, plus il y a de formes d'ozone et, d'ici le milieu du si\u00e8cle, les Am\u00e9ricains subiront probablement une augmentation de 70% du smog malsain caus\u00e9 par l'ozone, selon les pr\u00e9visions du Centre national de recherche sur l'atmosph\u00e8re. D'ici 2090, 2 milliards de personnes dans le monde respireront au-dessus du niveau \u00absans danger\u00bb de l'OMS. Selon un article publi\u00e9 le mois dernier, entre autres effets, l\u2019exposition d\u2019une m\u00e8re enceinte \u00e0 l\u2019ozone augmentait le risque d\u2019autisme chez l\u2019enfant (jusqu\u2019\u00e0 dix fois plus, combin\u00e9 \u00e0 d\u2019autres facteurs environnementaux). Ce qui vous fait penser encore \u00e0 l'\u00e9pid\u00e9mie d'autisme \u00e0 West Hollywood.<\/p>\n
D\u00e9j\u00e0, plus de 10 000 personnes meurent chaque jour des petites particules \u00e9mises par la combustion de combustibles fossiles; Chaque ann\u00e9e, 339 000 personnes meurent des suites d\u2019une fum\u00e9e de chemin\u00e9e, en partie \u00e0 cause de la prolongation de la saison des feux de for\u00eat (aux \u00c9tats-Unis, elle a augment\u00e9 de 78 jours depuis 1970). Selon le service forestier am\u00e9ricain, d\u2019ici \u00e0 2050, les feux de for\u00eat seront deux fois plus destructeurs qu\u2019aujourd\u2019hui; \u00e0 certains endroits, la superficie br\u00fbl\u00e9e pourrait \u00eatre multipli\u00e9e par cinq. Ce qui inqui\u00e8te encore plus les gens, c'est l'effet que cela aurait sur les \u00e9missions, en particulier lorsque les incendies ravagent les for\u00eats n\u00e9es de la tourbe. Les incendies de tourbi\u00e8res en Indon\u00e9sie en 1997, par exemple, ont augment\u00e9 les \u00e9missions de CO2 dans le monde de pr\u00e8s de 40%, et plus de br\u00fblure signifie seulement plus de r\u00e9chauffement signifie seulement plus de br\u00fblage. Il existe \u00e9galement la possibilit\u00e9 terrifiante que des for\u00eats pluviales telles que l\u2019Amazonie, qui a connu sa deuxi\u00e8me \u00abs\u00e9cheresse centenaire\u00bb en 2010, en cinq ans, se soient suffisamment ass\u00e9ch\u00e9es pour devenir vuln\u00e9rables \u00e0 ce type de feux de for\u00eat d\u00e9vastateurs et d\u00e9vastateurs – non seulement expulserait d\u2019\u00e9normes quantit\u00e9s de carbone dans l\u2019atmosph\u00e8re, mais r\u00e9duirait \u00e9galement la taille de la for\u00eat. C\u2019est particuli\u00e8rement grave, car l\u2019Amazonie fournit \u00e0 elle seule 20% de notre oxyg\u00e8ne.<\/p>\n\n\nEnsuite, il y a les formes de pollution les plus famili\u00e8res. En 2013, la fonte des glaces de l\u2019Arctique a transform\u00e9 les conditions m\u00e9t\u00e9orologiques en Asie, privant la Chine industrielle des syst\u00e8mes de ventilation naturelle dont elle d\u00e9pendait d\u00e9sormais, qui recouvrait une grande partie du nord du pays d\u2019un smog irrespirable. Litt\u00e9ralement irrespirable. Une m\u00e9trique appel\u00e9e Indice de qualit\u00e9 de l'air classe les risques et les plafonds entre 301 et 500, en avertissant de \u00abl'aggravation grave des maladies cardiaques ou pulmonaires et de la mortalit\u00e9 pr\u00e9matur\u00e9e chez les personnes atteintes de maladie cardiopulmonaire et les personnes \u00e2g\u00e9es\u00bb et, pour toutes les autres, \u00abRisque grave d'effets respiratoires\u00bb; \u00e0 ce niveau, \u00abtout le monde devrait \u00e9viter tout effort en plein air\u00bb. La \u00abloi a\u00e9rienne\u00bb chinoise de 2013 a culmin\u00e9 \u00e0 un indice de qualit\u00e9 de l'air de plus de 800. Cette ann\u00e9e-l\u00e0, le smog \u00e9tait responsable du tiers des d\u00e9c\u00e8s dans le pays.<\/p>\n
La violence s'est transform\u00e9e en chaleur.<\/em><\/p>\nLes climatologues font tr\u00e8s attention quand ils parlent de la Syrie. Ils veulent que vous sachiez que m\u00eame si le changement climatique a provoqu\u00e9 une s\u00e9cheresse qui a contribu\u00e9 \u00e0 la guerre civile, il n\u2019est pas tout \u00e0 fait juste de dire que le conflit est le r\u00e9sultat du r\u00e9chauffement; \u00e0 c\u00f4t\u00e9, par exemple, le Liban a connu les m\u00eames mauvaises r\u00e9coltes. Mais des chercheurs comme Marshall Burke et Solomon Hsiang ont r\u00e9ussi \u00e0 quantifier certaines des relations non \u00e9videntes entre la temp\u00e9rature et la violence: pour chaque demi-degr\u00e9 de r\u00e9chauffement, les soci\u00e9t\u00e9s verront une augmentation de 10 \u00e0 20% de la probabilit\u00e9 de conflit. En science du climat, rien n\u2019est simple, mais l\u2019arithm\u00e9tique est d\u00e9chirante: une plan\u00e8te plus chaude de cinq degr\u00e9s aurait au moins la moiti\u00e9 de la moiti\u00e9 des guerres d\u2019aujourd\u2019hui. Globalement, les conflits sociaux pourraient plus que doubler au cours de ce si\u00e8cle.<\/p>\n\nC\u2019est une des raisons pour lesquelles, comme presque tous les climatologues auxquels j\u2019ai parl\u00e9, l\u2019arm\u00e9e am\u00e9ricaine est obs\u00e9d\u00e9e par le changement climatique: noyer toutes les bases de la marine am\u00e9ricaine en raison de l\u2019\u00e9l\u00e9vation du niveau de la mer est d\u00e9j\u00e0 un probl\u00e8me, mais \u00eatre un policier du monde est une un peu plus difficile lorsque le taux de criminalit\u00e9 double. Bien s\u00fbr, ce n\u2019est pas seulement en Syrie que le climat a contribu\u00e9 aux conflits. Certains supposent que le niveau \u00e9lev\u00e9 de conflits au Moyen-Orient au cours de la derni\u00e8re g\u00e9n\u00e9ration refl\u00e8te les pressions du r\u00e9chauffement climatique – hypoth\u00e8se d'autant plus cruelle que le r\u00e9chauffement a commenc\u00e9 \u00e0 s'acc\u00e9l\u00e9rer lorsque le monde industrialis\u00e9 a extrait puis br\u00fbl\u00e9 le p\u00e9trole de la r\u00e9gion.<\/p>\n\nQu'est-ce qui explique la relation entre climat et conflit? Une partie de cela provient de l'agriculture et de l'\u00e9conomie; la migration forc\u00e9e, qui a d\u00e9j\u00e0 atteint un niveau record, compte au moins 65 millions de personnes d\u00e9plac\u00e9es errant sur la plan\u00e8te \u00e0 l'heure actuelle. Mais il y a aussi le simple fait d'irritabilit\u00e9 individuelle. La chaleur augmente les taux de criminalit\u00e9 municipale et les jurons sur les r\u00e9seaux sociaux, et la probabilit\u00e9 qu'un lanceur de la ligue majeure, venant au monticule apr\u00e8s que son co\u00e9quipier ait \u00e9t\u00e9 touch\u00e9 par un lancer, frappera un frappeur adverse en repr\u00e9sailles. Et l\u2019arriv\u00e9e de la climatisation dans les pays d\u00e9velopp\u00e9s, au milieu du si\u00e8cle dernier, n\u2019a gu\u00e8re contribu\u00e9 \u00e0 r\u00e9soudre le probl\u00e8me de la vague de criminalit\u00e9 estivale.<\/p>\n
Capitalisme d\u00e9moniaque dans un monde \u00e0 moiti\u00e9 plus pauvre.<\/em><\/p>\n\nLe mantra murmurant du n\u00e9olib\u00e9ralisme mondial, qui a pr\u00e9valu entre la fin de la guerre froide et le d\u00e9but de la grande r\u00e9cession, est que la croissance \u00e9conomique nous sauverait de tout et de rien.\nLes recherches les plus int\u00e9ressantes sur l'\u00e9conomie du r\u00e9chauffement proviennent \u00e9galement de Hsiang et de ses coll\u00e8gues, qui ne sont pas des historiens du capitalisme des fossiles, mais qui proposent une analyse tr\u00e8s sombre: Chaque degr\u00e9 de r\u00e9chauffement co\u00fbte en moyenne 1,2% du PIB. (un nombre \u00e9norme, si l\u2019on consid\u00e8re que nous comptons la croissance \u00e0 faible chiffre comme \u00abforte\u00bb). C\u2019est un travail remarquable sur le terrain, et leur projection m\u00e9diane pr\u00e9voit une perte de 23% de gains par habitant \u00e0 l\u2019\u00e9chelle mondiale d\u2019ici la fin du si\u00e8cle (r\u00e9sultant des changements survenus dans l\u2019agriculture, la criminalit\u00e9, les temp\u00eates, l\u2019\u00e9nergie, la mortalit\u00e9 et le travail).\nL\u2019ampleur de cette d\u00e9vastation \u00e9conomique est difficile \u00e0 comprendre, mais vous pouvez commencer par imaginer \u00e0 quoi ressemblerait le monde d\u2019aujourd\u2019hui avec une \u00e9conomie deux fois plus grande, produisant seulement la moiti\u00e9 de la valeur et ne produisant que la moiti\u00e9 de la valeur le monde. Cela fait penser que l\u2019\u00e9chouement de vols en provenance de Phoenix, frapp\u00e9e par la chaleur, le mois dernier, a l\u2019air de path\u00e9tiques petites pommes de terre \u00e9conomiques. Et, entre autres choses, l'id\u00e9e de remettre \u00e0 plus tard l'action gouvernementale en mati\u00e8re de r\u00e9duction des \u00e9missions et de ne compter que sur la croissance et la technologie pour r\u00e9soudre le probl\u00e8me devient un calcul absurde.\nLe sulfure jaillit de la c\u00f4te squelettique.<\/em><\/p>\nQue la mer devienne un tueur est une donn\u00e9e. \u00c0 moins d\u2019une r\u00e9duction radicale des \u00e9missions, nous verrons au moins quatre pieds d\u2019\u00e9l\u00e9vation du niveau de la mer, voire dix d\u2019ici \u00e0 la fin du si\u00e8cle. Un tiers des grandes villes du monde se trouvent sur la c\u00f4te, sans oublier ses centrales \u00e9lectriques, ses ports, ses bases navales, ses terres agricoles, ses p\u00eacheries, ses deltas de rivi\u00e8res, ses marais et ses empires de rizi\u00e8res. M\u00eame ceux de plus de dix pieds inondables beaucoup plus facilement. , et beaucoup plus r\u00e9guli\u00e8rement, si l\u2019eau monte aussi haut. Au moins 600 millions de personnes vivent aujourd'hui \u00e0 moins de dix m\u00e8tres du niveau de la mer.<\/p>\n\nMais la noyade de ces patries n'est que le d\u00e9but. \u00c0 l\u2019heure actuelle, plus d\u2019un tiers du carbone de la plan\u00e8te est aspir\u00e9 par les oc\u00e9ans – Dieu merci, sinon nous aurions d\u00e9j\u00e0 ce r\u00e9chauffement beaucoup plus important. Mais le r\u00e9sultat est ce que l\u2019on appelle \u00abl\u2019acidification des oc\u00e9ans\u00bb, ce qui, \u00e0 lui seul, peut ajouter un demi degr\u00e9 au r\u00e9chauffement de ce si\u00e8cle. Il est \u00e9galement en train de br\u00fbler dans les bassins d\u2019eau de la plan\u00e8te – vous vous en souvenez peut-\u00eatre comme l\u2019endroit o\u00f9 la vie est n\u00e9e. You have probably heard of \u201ccoral bleaching\u201d \u2014 that is, coral dying \u2014 which is very bad news, because reefs support as much as a quarter of all marine life and supply food for half a billion people. Ocean acidification will fry fish populations directly, too, though scientists aren\u2019t yet sure how to predict the effects on the stuff we haul out of the ocean to eat; they do know that in acid waters, oysters and mussels will struggle to grow their shells, and that when the pH of human blood drops as much as the oceans\u2019 pH has over the past generation, it induces seizures, comas, and sudden death.<\/p>\n\nThat isn\u2019t all that ocean acidification can do. Carbon absorption can initiate a feedback loop in which underoxygenated waters breed different kinds of microbes that turn the water still more \u201canoxic,\u201d first in deep ocean \u201cdead zones,\u201d then gradually up toward the surface. There, the small fish die out, unable to breathe, which means oxygen-eating bacteria thrive, and the feedback loop doubles back. This process, in which dead zones grow like cancers, choking off marine life and wiping out fisheries, is already quite advanced in parts of the Gulf of Mexico and just off Namibia, where hydrogen sulfide is bubbling out of the sea along a thousand-mile stretch of land known as the \u201cSkeleton Coast.\u201d The name originally referred to the detritus of the whaling industry, but today it\u2019s more apt than ever. Hydrogen sulfide is so toxic that evolution has trained us to recognize the tiniest, safest traces of it, which is why our noses are so exquisitely skilled at registering flatulence. Hydrogen sulfide is also the thing that finally did us in that time 97 percent of all life on Earth died, once all the feedback loops had been triggered and the circulating jet streams of a warmed ocean ground to a halt \u2014 it\u2019s the planet\u2019s preferred gas for a natural holocaust. Gradually, the ocean\u2019s dead zones spread, killing off marine species that had dominated the oceans for hundreds of millions of years, and the gas the inert waters gave off into the atmosphere poisoned everything on land. Plants, too. It was millions of years before the oceans recovered.<\/p>\n\nOur present eeriness cannot last.<\/em><\/p>\nSo why can\u2019t we see it? In his recent book-length essay The Great Derangement<\/em>,<\/em> the Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh wonders why global warming and natural disaster haven\u2019t become major subjects of contemporary fiction \u2014 why we don\u2019t seem able to imagine climate catastrophe, and why we haven\u2019t yet had a spate of novels in the genre he basically imagines into half-existence and names \u201cthe environmental uncanny.\u201d \u201cConsider, for example, the stories that congeal around questions like, \u2018Where were you when the Berlin Wall fell?\u2019 or \u2018Where were you on 9\/11?\u2019\u2005\u201d he writes. \u201cWill it ever be possible to ask, in the same vein, \u2018Where were you at 400 ppm?\u2019 or \u2018Where were you when the Larsen B ice shelf broke up?\u2019\u2005\u201d His answer: Probably not, because the dilemmas and dramas of climate change are simply incompatible with the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, especially in novels, which tend to emphasize the journey of an individual conscience rather than the poisonous miasma of social fate.<\/p>\n\nSurely this blindness will not last \u2014 the world we are about to inhabit will not permit it. In a six-degree-warmer world, the Earth\u2019s ecosystem will boil with so many natural disasters that we will just start calling them \u201cweather\u201d: a constant swarm of out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with climate events that not so long ago destroyed whole civilizations. The strongest hurricanes will come more often, and we\u2019ll have to invent new categories with which to describe them; tornadoes will grow longer and wider and strike much more frequently, and hail rocks will quadruple in size. Humans used to watch the weather to prophesy the future; going forward, we will see in its wrath the vengeance of the past. Early naturalists talked often about \u201cdeep time\u201d \u2014 the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. What lies in store for us is more like what the Victorian anthropologists identified as \u201cdreamtime,\u201d or \u201ceverywhen\u201d: the semi-mythical experience, described by Aboriginal Australians, of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea \u2014 a feeling of history happening all at once.<\/p>\n\nIl est. Many people perceive climate change as a sort of moral and economic debt, accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and now come due after several centuries \u2014 a helpful perspective, in a way, since it is the carbon-burning processes that began in 18th-century England that lit the fuse of everything that followed. But more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which means that, in the length of a single generation, global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial world\u2019s kamikaze mission is also the story of a single lifetime. My father\u2019s, for instance: born in 1938, among his first memories the news of Pearl Harbor and the mythic Air Force of the propaganda films that followed, films that doubled as advertisements for imperial-American industrial might; and among his last memories the coverage of the desperate signing of the Paris climate accords on cable news, ten weeks before he died of lung cancer last July. Or my mother\u2019s: born in 1945, to German Jews fleeing the smokestacks through which their relatives were incinerated, now enjoying her 72nd year in an American commodity paradise, a paradise supported by the supply chains of an industrialized developing world. She has been smoking for 57 of those years, unfiltered.<\/p>\n\nOr the scientists\u2019. Some of the men who first identified a changing climate (and given the generation, those who became famous were men) are still alive; a few are even still working. Wally Broecker is 84 years old and drives to work at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory across the Hudson every day from the Upper West Side. Like most of those who first raised the alarm, he believes that no amount of emissions reduction alone can meaningfully help avoid disaster. Instead, he puts his faith in carbon capture \u2014 untested technology to extract carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, which Broecker estimates will cost at least several trillion dollars \u2014 and various forms of \u201cgeoengineering,\u201d the catchall name for a variety of moon-shot technologies far-fetched enough that many climate scientists prefer to regard them as dreams, or nightmares, from science fiction. He is especially focused on what\u2019s called the aerosol approach \u2014 dispersing so much sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere that when it converts to sulfuric acid, it will cloud a fifth of the horizon and reflect back 2 percent of the sun\u2019s rays, buying the planet at least a little wiggle room, heat-wise. \u201cOf course, that would make our sunsets very red, would bleach the sky, would make more acid rain,\u201d he says. \u201cBut you have to look at the magnitude of the problem. You got to watch that you don\u2019t say the giant problem shouldn\u2019t be solved because the solution causes some smaller problems.\u201d He won\u2019t be around to see that, he told me. \u201cBut in your lifetime \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\nJim Hansen is another member of this godfather generation. Born in 1941, he became a climatologist at the University of Iowa, developed the groundbreaking \u201cZero Model\u201d for projecting climate change, and later became the head of climate research at NASA, only to leave under pressure when, while still a federal employee, he filed a lawsuit against the federal government charging inaction on warming (along the way he got arrested a few times for protesting, too). The lawsuit, which is brought by a collective called Our Children\u2019s Trust and is often described as \u201ckids versus climate change,\u201d is built on an appeal to the equal-protection clause, namely, that in failing to take action on warming, the government is violating it by imposing massive costs on future generations; it is scheduled to be heard this winter in Oregon district court. Hansen has recently given up on solving the climate problem with a carbon tax alone, which had been his preferred approach, and has set about calculating the total cost of the additional measure of extracting carbon from the atmosphere.<\/p>\n\n<\/aside>\nHansen began his career studying Venus, which was once a very Earth-like planet with plenty of life-supporting water before runaway climate change rapidly transformed it into an arid and uninhabitable sphere enveloped in an unbreathable gas; he switched to studying our planet by 30, wondering why he should be squinting across the solar system to explore rapid environmental change when he could see it all around him on the planet he was standing on. \u201cWhen we wrote our first paper on this, in 1981,\u201d he told me, \u201cI remember saying to one of my co-authors, \u2018This is going to be very interesting. Sometime during our careers, we\u2019re going to see these things beginning to happen.\u2019\u2005\u201d<\/p>\n\n\nSeveral of the scientists I spoke with proposed global warming as the solution to Fermi\u2019s famous paradox, which asks, If the universe is so big, then why haven\u2019t we encountered any other intelligent life in it? The answer, they suggested, is that the natural life span of a civilization may be only several thousand years, and the life span of an industrial civilization perhaps only several hundred. In a universe that is many billions of years old, with star systems separated as much by time as by space, civilizations might emerge and develop and burn themselves up simply too fast to ever find one another. Peter Ward, a charismatic paleontologist among those responsible for discovering that the planet\u2019s mass extinctions were caused by greenhouse gas, calls this the \u201cGreat Filter\u201d: \u201cCivilizations rise, but there\u2019s an environmental filter that causes them to die off again and disappear fairly quickly,\u201d he told me. \u201cIf you look at planet Earth, the filtering we\u2019ve had in the past has been in these mass extinctions.\u201d The mass extinction we are now living through has only just begun; so much more dying is coming.<\/p>\n
And yet, improbably, Ward is an optimist. So are Broecker and Hansen and many of the other scientists I spoke to. We have not developed much of a religion of meaning around climate change that might comfort us, or give us purpose, in the face of possible annihilation. But climate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must.<\/p>\n
It is not easy to know how much to be reassured by that bleak certainty, and how much to wonder whether it is another form of delusion; for global warming to work as parable, of course, someone needs to survive to tell the story. The scientists know that to even meet the Paris goals, by 2050, carbon emissions from energy and industry, which are still rising, will have to fall by half each decade; emissions from land use (deforestation, cow farts, etc.) will have to zero out; and we will need to have invented technologies to extract, annually, twice as much carbon from the atmosphere as the entire planet\u2019s plants now do. Nevertheless, by and large, the scientists have an enormous confidence in the ingenuity of humans \u2014 a confidence perhaps bolstered by their appreciation for climate change, which is, after all, a human invention, too. They point to the Apollo project, the hole in the ozone we patched in the 1980s, the passing of the fear of mutually assured destruction. Now we\u2019ve found a way to engineer our own doomsday, and surely we will find a way to engineer our way out of it, one way or another. The planet is not used to being provoked like this, and climate systems designed to give feedback over centuries or millennia prevent us \u2014 even those who may be watching closely \u2014 from fully imagining the damage done already to the planet. But when we do truly see the world we\u2019ve made, they say, we will also find a way to make it livable. For them, the alternative is simply unimaginable.<\/p>\n\n\n*This article appears in the July 10, 2017, issue of <\/em>New York Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n*This article has been updated to provide context for the recent news reports about revisions to a satellite data set,<\/em> to more accurately reflect the rate of warming during the\u00a0Paleocene\u2013Eocene Thermal Maximum, to\u00a0clarify a reference to Peter Brannen\u2019s <\/em>The Ends of the World, and to make clear that James Hansen still supports a carbon-tax based approach to emissions.<\/em><\/p>\n\n